Contact centers may originate communications, such as telephone calls, for various purposes. Telecommunications equipment commonly referred to as a “dialer” has the capability to originate a large number of telephone calls to various called parties and connect answered calls to available agents. A dialer is designed to keep the workforce of agents engaged in calls answered by called parties, as opposed to, e.g., answering machines.
The dialer processes a list of numbers to automatically dial, and upon detecting various conditions, the dialer may abandon the call and attempt to originate another call. For example, calls may be abandoned by the dialer upon reaching a no-answer condition, telephone number disconnected indication, out-of-service indication, or calls that are answered by an answering machine or voice-mail system. In each case, there is no party for the agent to talk to. Thus, it is possible for the dialer to originate a number of calls in order for the available agent to speak with a party. Once a called party answers, that call can be connected to an available agent.
Contact centers may handle outgoing call campaigns for various purposes. Contact centers may have campaigns for debt collection, conducting surveys, soliciting donations, and telemarketing. Each of these campaigns may be associated with one or more calling lists, which are lists of telephone numbers to be called. For example, a political survey campaign may have a corresponding set of calling lists, which are called at different times and pertain to different elections. Depending on the campaign, such as a survey for a national election, the calling list may be national in scope and cover a number of time zones.
When dialing numbers using a particular calling list, various factors may impact the success rate of the campaign. In one case, success can be a measure of the percentage of time agents are utilized in talking with called parties, as opposed to waiting to talk. In some instances, it may be necessary to switch from using one calling list to another to ensure that agents are being efficiently utilized. Determining when the appropriate time to switch a calling list can require significant experience. If a list is encountering poor performance (e.g., agents are not fully utilized), it may be due to some exigent circumstance that warrants suspending use of the calling list and starting another, or it may be due to normal fluctuations that do not warrant suspending the calling list.
Thus, it is desirable to have an automatic mechanism that provides a flexible and accurate determination of when to switch a calling list in a contact center to ensure that agent productivity is maximized. It is further desirable that such mechanisms are easy to administer and flexible to operate.